After I saw this
video on
TouchArcade:shock:, I keep wondering what kind of shadows are those in Oceanhorn? Why so many dynamic shadow won’t bring down performance on iOS?
Seems everything has shadow, buildings, trees, pickable items, boxes, characters.
Since the shadow will move along with the object, it can’t be pre rendered on the ground.
It is an iOS game, is shadow so cheap to use them in volume?
A pickable Jar has its shadow
Each segment of the flower has shadow
Player character’s shadow is projected to the stairs perfectly
Player under a bridge, the the shadow and light will cast on the player character
My questions are:
- What kind of shadow are they?
- Does Unity has build in these kind of shadows? If not, are there any 3rd party shadow package have same effect available, in the AssetStore?
- If it has to be implement by myself, then where to start from? A frame animation projector? Some kind of optimization magic?
Dynamic shadows are a feature of unity ios pro license. I believe you can request a trial of the pro license.
Jmonroe, thanks for your reply.
I have unity pro iOS license, but is of v3.5, which doesn’t support mobile shadow. No plan to upgrade yet.
How ever, I think Unity’s build in shadow feature won’t support so many shadows on mobile with such good quality with a acceptable performance. I haven’t seen any mobile game made with unity have this kind of shadow usage so far. Correct me if there’s one.
As of now, I think the most possible solution that near this quality is Shadow Volumes Toolkit, available in asset store. I am not sure if I can get a decent frame rate by using SVT. It may need some clever optimizations to achieve a good performance.
Yes, it depends on your device target. I think the same shadows could be achieved with unity built in shadows on ipad2 and above with near 60fps… At least that is what i get with 2 skinned humans and 3 other objects with dynamic shadows. Unfortunately performance drops off quickly when deploying to iphone4. Something like 25 frames per sec for me. I am looking at alternaitve shadows also.
Are you using Unity 4?
Can you add more objects, then test again on iPad2?
FYI, The screenshot of OceanHorn in my first post has 5 trees, 1 flower, at least 9 blocks of “Terrain”, 3 fences, 2 bridges, and some other things. At least 20 objects have shadows, and most of them are more complex than cubes.
If Unity’s build in shadow can handle this on iPad2, that will make me feel amazing, too.
http://www.slidetoplay.com/previews/slide-to-play-q-and-a-oceanhorn/
They say that they are using a custom game engine.
Other than that, I noticed that the camera angle stays the same. I suppose this enables the use of some relatively low cost projection technique of the shadow. Just speculating here of course.
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Ippokratis, thanks for the input. I know they are not using Unity, that’s why I think they have some tricks for their shadows. The fixed angle of the camera is good for optimization. However, I can’t think of any simple way to achieve the same quality and having good performance.
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Request 30 day trial for mobile pro. I think with some objects using static lightmap, while interactive objects and characters cast dynamic shadows you could achieve acceptable performance. Maybe 30 frames per sec is ok for this type of game also.
Although I don’t remember I installed Unity 4 on this machine before, the activation dialog of Unity 4 disabled the option of apply for trail .
I guess can’t apply for trial, unless I find a spare Mac. That why I have to ask for help to do the test .
Contact sales@unity3d.com and they’ll be happy to provide you with a trial license.
